Month: July 2017

The Choices We Make

I’ve talked to a few people about the essays on this site and I realized that more than anything else, it’s about choices. Some people agree with what I have to say, and that’s cool. Some people disagree, and that’s cool, too. Both options are completely valid. But whether you agree or disagree, here’s what matters:

It’s about the choices we make.

My point-of-view is that Star Trek is awesome. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a little kid, and I’ve remained a fan. Getting to work on Star Trek is a dream come true; While it’s nowhere near as profitable as other creative work I’ve done, it’s very important to me.

I think that STARFLEET has a responsibility to be awesome. I think it has to be great, because Star Trek is great. Television and movies are unidirectional media — It gets made and you get to watch it. It’s a passive thing. STARFLEET should be the next step, where individuals engage with each other and continue the conversation. It should where they learn from each other and build new things together. It should be where people from different backgrounds get together and explore. STARFLEET should be the interactive component that comes after Star Trek.

I don’t think STARFLEET has ever met the responsibility to be awesome. It’s helped to create a lot of long-standing friendships and inspire some really great parties and get-togethers and charity fundraising, but the same can be said of a lot of non-profits. STARFLEET should be different.

I want a STARFLEET that’s bold. I want a STARFLEET that inspires and rewards exploration. I want a STARFLEET that challenges people to think about the big stuff this planet has to offer and take action. I’m tired of seeing charity events used as a fig leaf to hide why people wear uniforms and enjoy time with their friends.

I want those uniforms to mean something.

And more than anything else, I want STARFLEET to never be good enough. I’m tired of the same stupid arguments over and over again about how to serve the members through newsletters and membership cards. Newsletters and membership cards? That’s what we argue about when we’re Star Trek fans? Ugh. Enough. Think big. Build big. Go deep.

We are Star Trek fans. We’re not weak. We’re the smart kids, and we deserve a hell of a lot better.

As mentioned in an earlier post, it seems to me that a lot of long-time members of STARFLEET look back to the days when the organization was a lot bigger, and a lot more relevant to Star Trek fans. The glory days, you know? Screw all of that. All of it. Forever. This is now, and we’re having a really hard time getting people to think about right now, and we’re supposed to be focused on the future. That show we love is about the future. We’re supposed to be all about what comes next.

Anyone can argue about regions and chapters and the membership and newsletters and finances and whatever other ordinary everyday noise that comes up. It’s easy. Everyone can create an opinion on that stuff. It’s so easy.

I’m tired of a STARFLEET that thinks that way. I’m tired of a STARFLEET that yells at the top of its lungs about how old it is or how many people are in it as opposed to the cool stuff we’re doing every day. We’re not yelling about the cool stuff we’re doing every day because we’re not doing it. We’re not enabling it. We’re not supporting it. We’re not helping to make it happen. Sometimes it happens independently and we’re lucky enough to write about it in the newsletter, but that’s simply not good enough.

STARFLEET isn’t good enough for Star Trek fans, and there’s a lot of evidence for that. The fans are expressing their fandom elsewhere and in different ways, and there’s no easy way to solve that problem. Changing the membership cost isn’t going to solve that problem. Rearranging the organization isn’t going to solve that problem. Finding new ways to present a static document isn’t going to solve that problem.

All of this stuff is an attempt to attract more people to the table by reshuffling the same deck of cards in a world where people aren’t interested in playing Cribbage anymore. It’s time to stop shuffling and learn some new games. We should have stopped shuffling fifteen years ago.

STARFLEET should be better than it is. It should be even better than it was. The difference is in the choices we make.

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An Incredibly Lean Decade.

A quote from a conversation I had this morning with a STARFLEET member in the UK.

“Our problem is that we have feast or famine with Trek. Aside from the JJ films it’s been a lean decade for Star Trek fandom. What do you fill that time with?“

You mean aside from the three films that have been so popular that they’ve made over 1.2 billion dollars and were consistently better-received by audiences than previous Star Trek movies by a significant factor? Well, alright then.

It’s been quite a lean decade, that’s true.

It feels like we didn’t even get six Starfleet Corps of Engineers books, the three-book Destiny series, all eight Typhon Pact novels, all five books of The Fall, the three-book Prey series, five books of the Department of Temporal Investigations. Five more Lost Era books. Seven Vanguard books. Four Seekers books. Three Cold Equations books. Oh, and the anthologies, like all three Mirror Universe anthologies. And the three Myriad Universes anthologies. Or the four Starfleet Academy books for the Young Adult crowd.

Or even books like ‘How To Speak Klingon,’ featuring a very handsome audio engineer.

Or the comic books that IDW has been putting out like Star Trek, Starfleet Academy and New Visions. And the crossover titles that bring the Star Trek universe together with Green Lantern, Planet of the Apes and Doctor Who. And cool trade paperback versions of each.

Board games that we almost didn’t see in the past decade include Star Trek: Expeditions, Star Trek: Fleet Captains, Star Trek Catan, Star Trek: Attack Wing or Star Trek: Ascendancy. And video games like Star Trek: DAC, Star Trek and the incredibly popular Star Trek Online. Also mobile games like Star Trek: Timelines, Star Trek: Trexels, Star Trek: Rivals, Convoy Raider 2013, Romulan 2014 and Starfleet 2014.

See?

This is why I’m crazy.

A STARFLEET member should know about these things. A STARFLEET member in the UK should absolutely know about the incredible Rachael Stott, the artist who drew that awesome dress-uniform Spock sketch above — She’s from London, draws Star Trek comics and is so good that she’s gotten hand-painted fan letters from Peter Capaldi.

If you’re a STARFLEET member and you’re not aware of the stuff I’ve mentioned here, STARFLEET has failed you. I’m not saying you have to know everything that’s coming out or that has come out, but you should probably know more. If you think the last decade has been ‘lean,’ I honestly don’t even know where to begin. The statement is abject nonsense.

Even all the stuff listed above isn’t everything! There are all kinds of new Star Trek shirts and clothing and Eaglemoss models and Mega Blox kits and new RPG beta-tests and listing every Star Trek thing that’s come out in the past decade would probably take an entire day to write up, and I type very quickly.

Okay, so that makes me crazy. But what’s worse?

Man, look at what this ignorance has wrought. We’ve got Star Trek hooks into fiction readers, comic book fans, tabletop gamers, video game fans, mobile gaming fans, role-playing game fans… and if we’re not informed about this stuff we can’t engage on these topics.

The idea that a Star Trek fan club can’t thrive in this environment is totally crazy. It can. They do! SFI isn’t thriving. Why are STARFLEET members buying these ridiculous excuses? A lean decade? Good lord.

—

NOTE: Yes, I’ve done a lot of work for CBS on Star Trek but it’s not like they give me information about this stuff. I wish they would! I’d be happy to tell more people about it, but licensing is a strange beast with a lot of arms (and twice as many heads). The only stuff they talk to me about is stuff that I can’t talk about. I have almost zero advantage over anyone else on gathering this information. I ain’t special.

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I joined STARFLEET in 1993…

…a phrase that makes my blood freeze every time.

Ah, the good old days. Back in the 90s when STARFLEET was really big and there were two STAR TREK shows on the air and the internet wasn’t really around just yet in a meaningful way. What usually follows is a description of the good old days, and while it’s nostalgic and fun, it’s important to put that into historical context. Since it’s hard to do so regarding STARFLEET (mainly because a lot of people don’t remember the walking nightmare that STARFLEET had become in the late 90s), I’ll approach it from another angle.

But for right now, think about a Star Trek fan in 1993. Think about what they need, what they want to talk about and how they’re likely to express it when it comes to their fandom. Keep thinking about that fan while I take you to an entirely different realm. A realm of heroism and wizardry, of fantasy and magic.

That’s right, another geek-friendly property that involves a bunch of friends getting together and having a good time. As it was and ever shall be. Or was. And is.

Welcome to 1993! I’m in an abandoned classroom in Solebury, PA. My friends are there — Stephen Francesconi (who got me into STARFLEET in the first place), Colin Brown and Brian Schaeffer. We stayed after school because Stephen mentioned that he wanted to run a D&D campaign. I’d never played before, but it certainly sounded like my kind of thing.

We played Dungeons and Dragons, but that’s actually not really fair to say. We were playing what was called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 2nd Edition. The Player’s Handbook looked like this.

We were all in the same room, sitting in chairs. We had pushed a couple of desks together to create a play-surface, and we used the copy machine at the library to make character sheets.

It wasn’t the only thing we used the copier for, either. I was an incredibly poor kid. There’s no way I would have been able to afford a Dungeons and Dragons book. I copied what I could out of books that belonged to my friends. They also had a surplus of dice, and let me use them. Whew! If it weren’t for the charity of my friends, I really wouldn’t have been able to learn to play D&D. I remain very grateful.

I understand the desire to remember way-back-when, too. Life was easier, I didn’t have bills to pay and I still had great knees. But most importantly, I miss Brian Shaeffer. He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. He passed away in 2010 after a long fight with cancer.

Let’s fast-forward about 24 years, to a couple of weeks ago.

It’s Wednesday night, and I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Neysha is in Louisiana. Mike is in Missouri. Dagny is in Los Angeles. Our Dungeon Master John is in New York. There’s still a character sheet on the table, but it’s a file open on my iPad. While there are still a tremendous number of dice at my place, there are none on my desk. We just roll dice using an application called Roll20. We can hear each other, we can see each other. It’s pretty great.

What the hell happened? You’re doing the same thing, and it’s the same thing, but it’s very different now.

That’s true. Even the game is different, technically. It’s the 5th Edition, but everyone just calls it ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ Obviously, technology has changed a lot. But it’s not enough to say that, because that isn’t the whole story.

Maybe it’s because I was dirt-poor, but it’s important to mention this. Dungeons and Dragons is effectively free. You can buy the books if you want, but you don’t have to. The Basic Rules are available for everyone — players and potential Dungeon Masters alike — absolutely free of charge 24 hours a day.

There are two important pieces here.

First, technology has made a tremendous difference in the way the game is played. That is to be expected.

The other part is this — The people that make Dungeons and Dragons have taken a look at how people play their game, and how it compares to how it used to be. They’ve been pro-active and responsive. They made a lot of very public and terrible mistakes along the way. Anyone in the hobby will be happy to tell you all about that. But they’re trying, and they’ve been incredibly successful.

I’m still thinking about that fan from 1993.

Good! Me, too. You’ve been thinking about how they do things and how they think about things. Obviously, there are a lot of awesome things going on for that fan in 1993. Things are awesome. But if you were to take a fan of the same age from 2017 and put them in the same place how would it look to them?

Very, very strange.

It would probably look like a freakin’ cult.

They would probably run far, far away.

And they have.

A lot of people that were playing Dungeons and Dragons are still playing. Likewise, a lot of Star Trek fans are still Star Trek fans. But does STARFLEET meet the needs of modern Star Trek fans? Technology makes a difference, but D&D changed to meet the needs of modern D&D fans. Can STARFLEET do the same?

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Exploration Is Your Business.

Are you a leader at any level in STARFLEET? STARFLEET is running in place and if that needs to change, something’s got to change. And maybe what needs to change is you.

Take a deep breath. Not everyone needs real-world experience to excel at non-profit operations. After all, some non-profits have been completely blown apart by Harvard MBAs that should have known better. But if you don’t have it, you can still inform yourself about what’s going on in the world of non-profits.

So, you’ve gotten elected. You’ve been appointed. It doesn’t stop there. Dig deep. Learn more. Look around.

There are a lot of incredible books about non-profit operations, for example. Managing the Non-Profit Organization by Peter Drucker. Charity Case by Dan Pallotta. Forces for Good by Crutchfield and Grant. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. The Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter, Allison Fine and Randi Zuckerberg. Good to Great by Jim Collins.

If you want to make better decisions for STARFLEET, you need to look outside of STARFLEET. Don’t stop at non-profits. Hit the library and pick up some books on leadership and management. Wear out your library card. You’re going to find a ton of ideas that sound great but are impossible to implement. You’re going to find a lot of ideas that sound terrible and would also be impossible to implement. But maybe you’ll find something that sounds great, and you can start implementing right now by yourself.

Your election or appointment has given you a tremendous opportunity to do a great job. Don’t just accept the title. Accept the challenge. Take responsibility. Explore.

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Potential Members Don’t Vote.

One of the myriad issues with STARFLEET elections is that all of the attention is usually spent on convincing the existing membership that a particular team is going to do a great job for the benefit of STARFLEET members. Here’s the problem with that.

Potential STARFLEET members do not vote in STARFLEET elections.

But we can learn a lot by looking at how Star Trek fans are choosing to express their fandom. The official Star Trek twitter account has 329,000 followers. 3.6 million people like the Star Trek page on Facebook. These people are out there. They’re not here. Star Trek is a great big property that’s been around for 50 years. It’s got some fans.

As of this writing, there are 4923 members in STARFLEET. That represents about 1.5% of the people on the Star Trek Twitter, and 0.13% of the Star Trek Facebook numbers. Even in the fandom category, STARFLEET is only half-as-large as the largest Star Trek fan club in the world.

One thing is pretty clear about those numbers: STARFLEET is not meeting the needs of Star Trek fans, or those numbers would be higher. Also, STARFLEET’s membership numbers haven’t really oscillated that much out of that range in the past decade or more, which raises the question of STARFLEET meeting the needs of STARFLEET members.

Even with a tremendous amount of marketing cash spent on launching Star Trek movies and TV shows, STARFLEET hasn’t been able to reap the benefits of those efforts. There’s a new series on the way, and the last three movies have made close to a billion dollars (if not more).

But I can already hear the age-old complaint — The Star Trek Facebook Page is free, so is the Star Trek Twitter account! So are other Star Trek fan clubs! We’re different because we charge money. According to Trek author Greg Cox, a decent rule-of-thumb for tie-in novels is that you can expect to sell books to about 1-2% of the viewing audience. A STARFLEET membership costs about as much as a new Star Trek novel, and they’ve sold millions of those books. It’s not about the membership dues.

In other words, something is wrong. If we want STARFLEET to be relevant again, we need to make some real changes.

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What Can You Do Today?

“Group projects make me understand why Batman prefers to work alone.”

Welcome to STARFLEET, The World’s Largest Star Trek Fan Club! Except that it isn’t, and it probably won’t be for a long time. While it’s bad enough that we’re saying it even though it isn’t true, it causes a larger problem.

Specifically, it makes people think that anything related to STARFLEET is a larger problem. A problem that requires a lot of man-hours to solve. Something that requires a team. Or even worse, a department. This is only one half of the problem, we’ll cover the other half in a few paragraphs.

At Amazon.com, teams are limited in size. Not by specific number, but by pizza. You’re trying to solve a problem, so you create a team to solve it. If you can’t feed the team with two pizzas, that team is too large and you have to break it up. At a company with over 370,000 employees.

It turns out that there’s a lot of science to back up how and why that works. It forces a hard limit against scaling problems. It creates an environment where communication isn’t just happening, but where communication is effective. Larger teams mean more stress for the people on them, too.

It’s not just Amazon that’s doing this. Even the largest banks in the country are dividing teams into smaller and smaller pieces not just for productivity and communication, but for the transparency that smaller teams provide. It’s a definite benefit in a highly-regulated environment, but the same benefit is useful to small non-profits, too.

We’ve already seen this play out in practice, even within STARFLEET. Chapter operations are nimble. ECAB meetings are glacial.

The other half of the problem is that in trying to solve problems, you’re giving people the idea that the organization is so huge, so massive, so international that there’s a very deep pool of talent from which to pull. There isn’t. So we see help requests like this:

Role Specifications
* To lead a team of artists (5-20 members depending on availability)
in Fleet-wide projects such as WeekOfDiscovery and the TNG Anniversary.
* Help in the production of visual art materials (such as videos,
posters, business cards, banners etc).
* Help in the development of the Fleet’s overall marketing approach,
and to help in the development of new methods of reaching a wider audience.
* To act as a project lead for Fleet-wide artistic efforts.
* To build a team of artists/content creators, organize materials,
assist in the development of team members, and review art materials for
legality.
Education/Person specifications
The person filling this role should have experience in one of the following
fields:
* Digital art/poster design
* 3D artistry
* Traditional Media/Art design
* Video/Podcast production, or videography experience
* Web Design (visual) or online media design
* Corporate marketing material design
The person should be in good standing within the Fleet, with a knowledge of
International Copyright law, and have some experience managing projects with
a small team (although this will not stop applications being accepted).
This role is open to any member of the Fleet who has been a member for more
than 6 months, regardless of chapter or region.

We don’t have 5-20 strong visual artists available right now (nor have we since the 90s), but the person leading this mythical team needs to have business-class experience in management and leadership and a working knowledge of international copyright law?

And what are the odds that these 5-20 people are all going to be using the same development platform? Pretty low. They can’t be. The differences in skill set between making a great poster and making a great video are tremendous. The tools you use to create those things are different for each job. It’s not like expecting a motorcycle mechanic to have metric wrenches and standard wrenches. It’s like expecting a motorcycle mechanic to have metric wrenches and also be a Korean pop sensation.

So, let’s pull focus for just a second here. We’re smaller than we think. We need to think smaller. Much, much smaller.

Let’s say that you’re in leadership. A STARFLEET member comes to you with an idea that would be of interest to STAR TREK fans, and of interest to STARFLEET members. Your first question should be this: What Can You Do Today?

If they want to build a team? Say no. If they want to start a department? Say no. Ask them what they — the individual member — can do today. Define the problem that they’re trying to solve (or the service that they intend to provide), and ask them about the first step. What can they do today? Where will they be in two weeks? Can they finish in thirty days? Can they do this by themselves? If they can, you’re way ahead of the game.

Because if their idea works, you’ve used their time wisely. If their idea doesn’t work, you should shut it down and thank them very much for their time. If they can’t get to work on something today, it’s probably not worth considering right now, and you should investigate further when we’re a little closer to where we should be in terms of developing the talent pool.

What can you do today?

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